Good to know, thanks for the info. I know me and I know will be most likely be caught in a cycle of upgradeitis due to curiosity unless I get it out of my system now so I am shooting a little higher than necessary. Usually it works, the last "poor man's audiophile" stereo (store owner's terminology) I bought was around 1989 (i.e., amp and speakers unchanged) and I have been satisfied until now when our sd tv died and we upgraded to plasma hdtv.
I estimate with a cheap option like Emo or Outlaw at most it will cost less than $1k to go with separates over a good AVR and then I will never have to wonder and will anyway not even be able to afford to upgrade the amplification unless they come up with a killer must have feature like teleportation, so I can put that aspect of the project to rest and never have to think about amplification again for the next 5 to 10 or even 20 years, unless something breaks.
The other issue I have is that processors do require updating at times (e.g., I have a rotel cd player, an awesome sounding hk cd to cd recorder, a dvd player, dvd recorder, and now blu ray player, still don't even have an sacd player), so it irks me to pay a lot for a receiver with powerful amplification included that is costing me a lot when I may want to upgrade and then have to pay for the integrated amplification all over again when I could just upgrade the processor itself, that would actually wind up being an impediment to the upgrade path when the upgrade might actually make sense by allowing me to take advantage of all the latest formats and processing capabilities.
Thanks for the opportunity to think this through, I think that's the main point, if the processor is separate it will leave me more flexibility to upgrade as necessary without having to pay twice for powerful amplification without any added benefit other than for the manufacturer who will make more money.
